More reasons to vote Democratic tomorrow.

This election has been, most people will agree, one of the most nasty and divisive of recent memory.  I think we’ve got to go back over a hundred years to the War between the States (Civil War, to you Yanks) to find one as divisive and full of anger as this one.

One question I’ve heard from the progressives I know has been, “Why?”  Why are the Conservatives so nasty, so bigoted, so angry and full of lies?  It isn’t an easy question.  I’d love to sit here between the keyboard and my chair and give you all a definitive answer, but if I could to that, I’d be making a lot more money somewhere else, and a lot more people would be reading this blog.  A lot of other people have written probably millions of words, many for TV, about this subject, and we are no wiser.

But I do want to bring some things to your attention that may help you see this election a bit clearer.

First, I believe that a little thing called Confirmation Bias is behind a lot of it.  A lot of people are being told things that confirms their internal biases and bigoted beliefs, and in spite of the goals of those doing the telling being diametrically opposed to their interests, those people are listening, because they are hearing things they want to hear.

Look, this country has gotten more and more progressive over the last hundred years and a lot of people don’t like it.

This is, I think, a result of the lingering affects of the War Between the States.  I use that term deliberately, because to you Yankees, you don’t understand how that war still affects Southern attitudes.  Almost 700,000 people in this country, on both sides, either died or were maimed in that war.  Not a single Southern family didn’t either lose someone or know a friend or neighbor who did.  The ending of that war ended a way of life.  It turned the Southern States upside down and decimated an economy already ravaged by a long war.  The South endured the Reconstruction period, which is a kind and gentle term for a long and bitter military occupation.  There are parts of the South which have never recovered economically, due to the death of the Plantation system.  People who live there are poor and have been ever since.  The fact that a lot of them were before that war is of no consequence to emotions.  In Southern schools, including the one I attended in high school, Allen Military Academy, still teach that war as the War between the States, and not as a civil war.

[Note:  In that vein of reasoning, the Southern States did legally secede, by Act of Legislature, signed by Governors.  They then formed a new country, the Confederate States of America, with its own Legislature, Constitution, Courts and President.  It coined its own money and defended its borders with a uniformed army.  All things done by sovereign countries.  The war which resulted was also called the War of Northern Aggression, as the US invaded the South.  A civil war is fought by opposing factions for control of a single national entity, while the War Between the States was fought between two organized national entities.  One can argue as one wishes, but in the end, the victor writes the history, and the US obviously wished to send the message that secession was not a legal option.]

So, you see the point of why the South is and always has been in such an uproar - ever since the Civil War (I just flunked Texas History class - but that is obviously a shorter term), Conservatives have been fighting a rear-guard action, in constant retreat against the forces of Progressivism.

Blacks got freed, women gained more and more rights until they eventually got the vote, labor unions gained power and curtailed the power of the robber barons of the 19th century.  Followed by more and more labor rights - the 40 hour work week, vacation benefits, Federal PAID holidays, sick days off, health and life insurance, etc.  Yes, the Southern poor have benefited greatly by these, and would likely kill today to protect them IF they perceived that these rights and benefits were in jeopardy.

But they don’t, because those who would deny us those rights are lying to us.  They lie because they’d lose if they told the truth.  Like the Nazi Party would have lost those famous 1930‘s elections had they allowed the electorate of Germany to hear of their true intentions.

Don’t believe me?

Then go look at this.  Yeah, this page is aimed at Jewish voters, but read down to the bottom of the first page at the goals of one of the groups funding the American Majority, the Bradley Foundation.

"...to return the U.S. -- and the world -- to the days before governments began to regulate Big Business, before corporations were forced to make concessions to an organized labor force."

That group was named after Harry Bradley, a man who was also a co-founder of the John Birch Society alongside the Koch Brothers’ father.  Quite a lineage!

Quite a goal.

So tomorrow, before you go vote, think about those guys.  Think about their goals, which are not only to destroy the many progressive gains we have enjoyed for almost a century or more, but to bring us back to the early days of the 19th century.  They want to take away all the rights we’ve gained that make our society what it is today!

Not just women’s rights, but ALL our rights!  They want the Corporations to rule your life, to rule and control YOU!  Cradle to grave.  Back to 16 hour work days, six days a week, broken only by Sunday so you can go to church and feed that ugly monster again, just so it can keep you downtrodden and unable to resist.

If you think the Industrial Revolution in England before government regulation was invented was just peachy keen, then vote Republican tomorrow.

If you kinda-sorta like that vacation time, the paid time off holidays, the sick leave and health insurance along with those nice short 40 hour work weeks, then vote Democrat.

They’re the guys that earned those nice bennies for you in the first place.  I think they’re more likely to help you keep them in the future.